After years of intense effort, officials here in rural Sindhupalchok district had persuaded almost all of the nearly 61,000 households to each build a toilet. Then the earthquake struck, destroying most houses — and the very toilets that could have helped stave off the diseases that can run rampant after natural disasters.
Now, instead of celebrating a public health triumph, residents are holding services for their dead and digging through the rubble to find more bodies. And relief workers are pouring into the district, hoping to salvage the remarkable progress in improving hygiene made here in recent years. “There will be outbreaks of cholera and other diseases,” said Antti Rautavaara, chief of water, sanitation and hygiene for UNICEF in Nepal. “It is a battle we cannot win. We can only try to minimise the pain and death.”
Two weeks have passed since a magnitude 7.9 earthquake devastated large swaths of this mountainous country, killing more than 7,900 people and injuring more than 17,000. Nepal’s government and charitable organisations are racing to beat monsoon season, which begins in about six weeks, to get tents and food to as many as 800,000 Nepalis whose homes are uninhabitable.
But they say an equally urgent task is to provide clean water and toilets before the rains make the poor sanitary environment in these devastated areas far worse by carrying contaminants into water supplies and making direct contact with faecal bacteria almost inevitable.
Diarrhoea outbreaksSmall outbreaks of diarrhoea have been reported across Nepal since the earthquake, and although such outbreaks are routine here, they have raised worries that the quake’s aftermath is at least partly to blame. But getting residents to consider building more toilets amid the devastation has not been easy.
More than 80 charities and government agencies have poured into Nepal since the quake to work on its well-documented water and sanitation problems.
They are coming to a country that was already among the world’s most unsanitary, with a 2011 government survey finding that 45 per cent of Nepalis did not use toilets, one reason 82 percent of drinking water supplies are contaminated with fecal bacteria.
A study found that about 11 percent of Nepalese children have diarrhoea at any given moment, which contributes to the stunting that affects more than a third of the nation’s children, according to government figures.
Arun Simkhad, the district water and sanitation chief, said the area had been tantalisingly close to having all its residents use toilets when the quake undid the progress. “People are going to rebuild their homes,” Simkhad said. “And when they do, we are asking them to build a toilet as well.” — New York Times News Service
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